26 Professional Photoshop Retouching Tutorials

By Tomas Laurinavicius

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Adobe Photoshop is the go-to tool for digital artists when it comes to professionally retouching images. Enhancing and retouching photos in Photoshop is an effective way to "work with what you’ve got".

There are many tips, tricks, and techniques for improving things like skin tone and imperfections, and enhancing the photo subject’s features. This article shares a huge variety of photo retouching tutorials for Photoshop users with brief descriptions of each.

Learn how to improve a poorly taken photograph by reducing its noise in this Photoshop subject-enhancing tutorial. You will also discover a fast and simple way for smoothing out a person’s skin with realistic results.

You can learn how to lower the amount of beard stubbles a person has by reading this excellent Photoshop retouching tutorial. The tutorial covers layer masking techniques, effective usage of the Healing Brush Tool, and layer blending options.

This tutorial goes over an easy method for digitally applying makeup on a subject for a beautiful and realistic outcome. Some Photoshop tools and features used are the Reduce Noise Filter, the Paint Brush Tool, and the Eraser Tool.

Learn the basics of photo retouching and enhancing a photos color by way of the colorization method. The Gaussian Blur filter, Curves image adjustment, and the Smart Sharpen filter are just some of the options applied in this Photoshop tutorial.

If you would like to apply a digitally placed tattoo on a subject’s body – perhaps either to cover up imperfections or to make them look badass – this tutorial goes over a method that offers realistic results.

Retouching usually aims to reduce aging in someone’s features, but what if you wanted to do the opposite? In this retouching/enhancing tutorial – you’ll learn a method for realistically aging someone’s facial features.

Learn to brighten the subject’s teeth for a pearly-white smile in this Photoshop tutorial that uses the Quick Selection Tool for easy area selection and a Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer to get the job done.

You can enhance a photo subject by altering their natural features. One way to end up with eye-grabbing results is by changing a person’s hair color; this Photoshop tutorial shows you how to do it with basic masking tools and layer styles.

Airbrushing is used by professional makeup artists to prepare subjects for photo shoots. In this retouching tutorial, you’ll discover how to perform this process digitally with the help of Photoshop tools such as the Surface Blur Filter and the Paint Brush Tool.

This professional-level Photoshop tutorial goes over the ways in which you can give someone a full digital makeover, including how to whiten eyes to make the subject look more vibrant, using the Paint Brush Tool in conjunction with lay blending modes.

The Spot Healing Brush Tool, the Warp Transform option, and downloadable Photoshop brushes are some of the things this excellent facial retouching tutorial on Grafpedia utilizes to enhance the eye area of the photo subject.

This quick and easy beginner level Photoshop tutorial goes over some basic masking methods using the Quick Mask Mode and the Paint Brush Tool to smoothen a person’s facial skin for a flawless surface, a technique used in many print magazines.

In this video tutorial on Abduzeedo, you’ll observe methods that professionals use in order to enhance the subject of a photograph. Color correction, reshaping of body features, and adjusting depth of field are just some of the things covered in here.

This detailed, step-by-step Adobe Photoshop tutorial covers a technique for enhancing a person’s nose. The Lasso Tool, Free Transform, and the Healing Brush Tool are the main Photoshop features utilized in this process.

In this Photoshop retouching video tutorial, you will get to see a method for digitally adjusting someone’s hair. The tutorial goes over removing unwanted parts of the hair, adjusting tonal values, and working with blending modes.

What’s great about Photoshop is that you can often get exceptional results in a short amount of time. This step-by-step Photoshop face retouching tutorial goes over how to achieve realistic and impressive results in a matter of minutes.

This photo-retouching tutorial outlines several handy techniques for improving an image, such as taking advantage of the Patch Tool for skin blemishes and using the Turbulence Tool for smooth pixel scattering and for blurring out imperfections.

Here is a Photoshop tutorial for applying realistic makeup on photos; it utilizes the Dust & Speckle Noise Filter as a layer mask and Shadow/Highlight Image Adjustments to enhance your images swiftly and painlessly.

You can lighten and soften a person’s skin tone and texture by following along this excellent Photoshop tutorial that uses options such as the Soft Light layer mode, Selective Color Image Adjustments and Curves Image Adjustments.

Got a photo retouching tip?

If you know of a good resource or tip on how to digitally-enhance a photo subject, please share it with the rest of us in the comments. * Edited by Jacob Gube

Seriously? I think most of these look overly-done and terrible. The “increase breast size” picture made the hair bend in an unrealistic way. The whitened teeth one looks ridiculously fake. Most of this is the kind of stuff that ends up on photoshopdisasters.com.

yeah i like the before pictures better. i like real life, real people, which is hard to find unless you are actually seeing somebody in person anymore. thanks photoshop and internet for making everyone think they are a “graphic artist”. and every other time i hit my stumbleupon button, it comes up with some website claiming to have the “70 bagillion best photoshop tutorials” or something similar. how…un-unique. that being said, i can’t photoshop for crap, nor do i want to, so if you have the skills then good for you, that’s awesome.

A little too much of the blur-tool there.
When you can’t see pores, NO ONE believes the photo. Even in the most retouched ads (and I’m talking ads in magazines like Allure and Cosmo) you can still see some light hair on the cheeks/some skin texture.

A picture with no skin texture is not only unbelievable, it makes the image plunge very quickly into uncanny-valley territory. Seriously.

There’s way too much gaussian blur going on here, although the aging tutorial is impressive and informed. The ‘over-photoshopping’ that people talk of is usually the exact opposite, corner-cutting looks awful and unnatural. A masked gaussian/surface blur is absolutely no substitute for pixel level dodging and burning, this stuff takes hours not minutes.

Hey, I want to know which Photoshop are you using with this Retouching stuff? I have CS5 on my computer..and i tried to use those steps like yourself, but it seems I don’t have all of the steps/tools in my photoshop =/ and I can’t do such stufd to the end like you.. PLEASE HELP? Thanks for answering.

These tutorials are great for those who want to learn how to edit a photo quickly. I don’t think they are intended for someone who wants to do professional level editing. And that’s okay. Images that may look too plastic can be toned down by using different values but still use the same tools as in the lessons. In the change eye color tutorial for example, the mask overlaps part of the lashes and the color change is applied to the lashes. In a non professional photo, no one will notice. If it’s professional, it likely will be caught. These are quick ways to edit and help learn what the tools do. And with that in mind, they work.